Video transcript So learning to programme, learning to code, can be a real challenge. Whether it’s Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Objective-c, PHP, these kinds of languages can be real tough to learn and there’s a lot of terminology to take in. I want to share with you some of the things that I’ve found along my path of becoming a better developer that I hope you’ll find useful. We’ve all felt that way, we’ve all felt like giving up, we’ve all felt like, “I’m not smart enough. I’m not intelligent enough. If only I had been coding since I was 12, then I’d have this thing locked!” You have to push beyond the point that you feel like giving up! When you combine that attitude with daily practice, it will begin to come together. Your main focus in the beginning is to grasp the general concepts of the language. Don’t worry too much about understanding every little nuance of the language. Even David Malan the Harvard computer science lecturer, he said to himself, he put off learning computer science because he said to himself, “Oh that’s for guys that have been coding since they we’re 13!” Now look at him, he’s a Harvard computer science lecturer! So we’ve all thought that. Don’t play victim by getting the violin out and feeling sorry for yourself, be positive, strengthen your resolve, be determined and that attitude will serve you well throughout your career. I had a conversation with a developer just the other week and he – has been coding since he was 12 and even he said look Mike even I...

Video transcript Team Treehouse and Lynda.com, are they worth it, and if so, which one should you go for? Let’s talk about that. Sometimes in life the best things aren’t free. Yes there’s a lot of great free content out there, but when it comes to the videos on these two platforms, they’re on a different level. The people that present on there are at the top of their game and they’re at the leading edge of their specific topic. A lot of them have mastered the craft of presenting to camera and teaching. We’re talking about guys like Simon Allardice, and James Williamson. They get paid large sums of money to fly across the world to present and teach. More-over when you make an investment you’re more likely to take the content seriously and you’re more likely to act upon what is being presented. Now, in terms of which platform you should go for, they each have their own pros and cons. I do think it’s a little unfair to pit them against each other because I don’t believe they’re actually competing against each other. However, if you’re a beginner I would go with Team Treehouse. They’re geared towards the beginner web developer and beginner web designer and they break the content into manageable chunks. They do a real good job of creating a fun, quirky vibe. Lynda.com on the other hand, their vibe, to me, comes across as being very authoritative and very thorough and they really dig deep into little nuances of technology. There is a plethora of content on there. When it comes to sheer...

Video transcript So in web development right now there is something new coming out every two weeks and it can be a real challenge to keep up with it. I have found that the solution is to be selective as to what you listen to. I’ve got a lot of podcasts on my iPhone and sometimes I’ll be listening to a podcast and I’m 10 minutes into it and I’m not even excited about what’s being said, and I’m not enthusiastic about the conversation, yet I’ll continue to listen to it because I’m afraid that I’m going to miss out on a vital piece of information and that’s not the right attitude. So I’ve started to become very selective. If I’m 10 minutes into a podcast and I’m not enjoying it then I’ll stop it and move on. They say, “Don’t learn for the sake of learning,” and there’s some truth to that. The best type of learning is when you’re learning things that are pertinent to the challenges that you face now. So the best way to learn is to decide, “Ok, I want to build this application!” or, “I want to build a web site that’s going to solve this problem!” Then seek out the information that is going to help you along that path. So, you know you’re suffering from information overload when it becomes ‘noise like’ when it feels like it’s just noise. The issue isn’t that there’s too much information, the issue is that there’s so much information that we couldn’t possibly process all of it! What you need to do then is re-access...